The Borderlands movie continues to circle the drain in a way that, as I mentioned yesterday, is so dramatic that it just makes me kinda sad—its US box office debut coughed up a ‘not good enough for the balance sheets’ number of $8.8 million which, according to Variety, is a whole lot of scratch shy of the $115 million it took to make and the $30 million it cost to market and distribute.
As per GamesIndustry.biz, the global box office numbers are out and, oof, they aren’t looking that much better. The grand gross (as in gross income, I’m not just being extra mean) of the Borderlands movie? $16.5 million.
As an exercise, let’s do some quick, ad-hoc maths on how much money Lionsgate needs to make to even start breaking even. The movie cost $145 million to make if you squish those production and marketing/distribution values together. The studio claims that 60% of production costs—that’s $69 million—were covered by presales. Slap the $16.5 million on top of that, and you get $85.5 million. There’s a remaining dent of $59.5 million to find the dough for.
Except it’s even worse than that. Box office numbers are taken before a movie theatre gets its money, a cut that can be anywhere from 20%-50% depending on a number of factors including the theatre and the studio’s pull over it (large productions will often see the studio raking in more, smaller theatres will often get worse deals, and so on).
The exact number landing in the studio’s pocket is hard to call, but you can reasonably say that Lionsgate is (in the most optimistic scenario) seeing about two thirds of it.
In terms of how that’ll impact the actual Borderlands franchise? Luckily for Gearbox and Take-Two Interactive, not at all. In an interview with IGN, Take-Two’s CEO—who wants us to give the movie a chance—emphasised that “the performance of the film wouldn’t have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another.”
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who has been severely posting through it, doubly confirms this on Twitter: “Whatever was spent on the movie came from the movie studio, Lionsgate,” Pitchford writes, before launching into the following spiel:
“We’re working on our games and are pretty happy that there’s a whole lot of people who now know about Borderlands that didn’t know about it before. I’m stoked you think we do better with our games than what some of the best actors and filmmakers on the planet did with the movie—that’s super flattering! You did see the movie, right?”
In fairness to Pitchford, it’s likely many of those dunking on it didn’t see the movie, statistically speaking. PC Gamer’s news writer Joshua Wolens did, though, and he didn’t like it—though it seems his “disconcerting impression it could end up a (relative) box office success” has not materialised.
